Super Bowl Party

So, first I posted all the deliciousness I was thinking about making, but there’s a little difference between what I could make and what I ended up making. Since I pretty much invited myself over to my friend Ashleys house and asked her to have a party, so as not to have to venture into the City, I thought I’d try to make as many of the appetizers as I could (and cupcakes, not pictured but they were chocolate with purple icing and black sprinkles). Plus, who doesn’t need a reason to gorge? Isn’t that what American and the Super Bowl is all about? And I am nothing, if not a True American.

So for the menu, I wanted a little mix of slightly healthy, medium healthy, and possible entry for TIWYF. I think the menu is definitely a good little compromise.

Under the slightly healthy appetizer category, we made a shrimp salsa.

I wasn’t sure if it would turn out but I actually thought it was pretty awesome. I used this recipe almost exactly except that I used a little less shrimp. The recipe says to use a pound and I could only find a 12oz bag, but I thought it was fine. I also didn’t use quite as much cilantro because I’m just not a huge cilantro fan. There comes a point where I think it tastes like soap. I don’t know what it is. Oh, and of course I’m serving it with blue (but purple for tonight) tortilla chips.

Next up we have another mostly healthy recipe with these purple deviled eggs.

I didn’t really love the recipe ideas as far as how to dye the eggs. I saw that you could dye them with beet juice, red wine, etc. I decided to just go old school and use food coloring. I think they turned out pretty well. I used my moms deviled egg “recipe”. The thing about my moms recipe is that really it’s just “a little bit of this, a little bit of that”. Not exactly the best recipe to hand out to everyone but I’ll still put the general recipe at the bottom of the page, and how to dye them. I guess everyone has their own way of making them.

Next we’ll go with a slightly less healthier recipe, in my TIWYF candidate – bacon wrapped lil’ smokies in a brown-sugar maple glaze.

Sorry for the picture, it seems the only one I took was mid-cooking so the bacon wasn’t totally done and it may look like they’re sitting in grease but I promise it’s just the glaze. Also, I would take them out of the glaze and put them on a plate to serve them just to prevent them from getting TOO greasy.

This is the recipe I used and it made about… 60 lil’ smokies? Give or take? It filled a 9×13 pan. And they were freaking DELICIOUS! I cannot wait to make these again for any kind of food eating extravaganza! They were so simple to make (maybe 20 minutes to wrap everything in bacon) and unlike how the recipe said I should freeze the lil’ smokies, I just took them right out of the fridge with the bacon and wrapped them up, and it worked just fine. I will say their recommendation to “dry off” the lil’ smokies to help them stick to the bacon better. I didn’t do that at first and quickly realized it was necessary.

We also made Zacks family dip.

(Disregard the weird yellowishness in the dip, that’s maple glaze I spilled on the dip. Didn’t even realize I did it until I was looking at the picture on my computer. Whoops!) Like the deviled eggs, it’s not a precise recipe, it’s kind of like our spaghetti sauce, you have the ingredients and the rough amounts but really you just have to keep adding and tasting until it’s the right consistency. I’m not even going to attempt to give you a recipe because well, it’s private, but if you want to try it, I can tell you it has 2 packages of cream cheese, milk, onion powder and Worcestershire sauce. The only amounts I know are the cream cheese. Maybe one day I’ll make it and Zack can tell me how he does it. Until them, I am happily the taste tester and nothing more 🙂

We also had some yummy Ledo’s Pizza, meatballs, and queso dip. Everything was delicious, but nothing was as delicious as Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance… oh, and the Ravens winning. And John Harbaugh when he smiles. Those are all delicious things too.

Many thanks to my dear friend Ashley and her husband for inviting us over! It was a great way to spend the evening!

Cut the hard boiled eggs in half and gently remove the yolks.
Mix the yolks and the remaining ingredients except the paprika, in a food processor.
Pulse for about 10 seconds, taste, adjust.

How’s that for a recipe? What’s worse is that I hate deviled eggs so I always have to make sure someone that likes deviled eggs is around so they can taste them and tell me what they need more of. In this instance, and in most, it’s my husband, the deviled egg lover. The dying of the eggs part is a little more specific.

By specific, I mean beyond simple. Fill a bowl that will fit all your hard boiled egg whites, with ice cold water (but don’t add the egg whites yet). Then add dye until it’s the color you want – for me it was about 3-4 drops of “violet” which was actually blue, and 3 drops of red. Then you want to place your already cut (with the yolks removed) egg whites into the water, put it in the fridge for 2 hours, and you’re done! As with most dying processes, the more dark you want it, the longer you leave it in the dye. For me that was 2 hours.

I used a piping bag (aka ziploc) to get the yolk mixture into the egg whites. It’s a lot cleaner and prettier than attempting to spoon the mixture in. One the mixture is in, gently sprinkle with paprika.

Also, because they’re purple, with yellow centers, I was calling them Ravens Eyes. Although sprinkling them with paprika made that a little weird. haha.